NCIS Season 10 Opener Leaves Us Disappointed

Last night was the season opener for NCIS, which has been our favorite show for a few years – although recently Breaking Bad overtook this honor. Since last season’s cliffhanger, we’ve been highly anticipating this and although it had a somewhat satisfying ending, it was disappointing due to a number of vast plot holes. The writing was less than stellar – in fact it was downright sloppy at times.

First off at the beginning there was a glimpse of the criminal/bad guy (Scott Wolf as Jonathan Cole) who tried to redeem himself by defusing the car bomb. He was dead on the ground and virtually intact. OK, we knew he would be dead because he was kneeling on top of the bomb when it went off. But considering the size of the blast, he should have been incinerated.

Next we have Tony and Ziva trapped in the elevator in which we last saw them. They are wondering how long they may be trapped and if anyone is looking for them. Then Ziva gets a phone call from her father. What? They still have working phones and they did not think of using them? Nobody else thought of trying to call them either to see where they were and if they were OK. Duh.

Then there was a totally implausible setup by the FBI to kill the villain Harper Deering. Apparently they have no problem locating him and he is approached and lured into a hotel room by a woman who appears to be a prostitute but is really a FBI agent. When Deering goes into the bathroom, she leads a team of machine gun-toting agents who spray the bathroom door with gunfire. They discover he has escaped through a window and left a bomb which promptly blows them up. The shoddiness of this whole effort is ridiculous. If they knew where he was, why didn’t they just grab him? The whole setup of the hooker and the motel room was dubious and just dumb. Are you telling me they would not have agents watching all the exits?

They get another chance to capture him when he calls from a cell phone in a van and McGee manages to trace its location to a parking lot. Another team moves in (via helicopter this time) to capture him and it turns out to be another trap when the car explodes. More agents appear to have been killed. Haven’t they learned their lesson by now?

Apparently not. They trace his possible location to some cabin and their team just storms right in, totally forgetting Deering’s habit of setting bombs all over the place. Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to send in a bomb-sniffing robot first? They do have those now. Luckily Deering must have been feeling generous as he lets them live while he escapes through some convenient prohibition-era tunnel.

Once again they figure out where he may have gone and Gibbs decides to go to this house by himself. It was satisfying when Gibbs dispatches Deering with a knife, but again the whole setup was not very believable.

We certainly hope the episodes for the rest of the season are written much better than this one – otherwise this could be the last season.